Throughout his illustrious career in television, stage, and film, Marvin Einhorn worked with some of the biggest names in entertainment. He directed NBC Nightly News,The Today Show, and Mr. Wizard during a 30-year career at NBC, performed with the likes of Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own, and had a theater named for him and his wife, Anne, in New York City.

But there may have been nothing that moved Einhorn more than Henry Beston’s book, The Outermost House.

“I can remember my dad talking about The Outermost House. It was his passion,” Marvin’s son, Ken Einhorn, wrote to me last year. “I’m not sure of the year, but it was in the early 60′s, we went on pilgrimage to see the ‘Fo’castle.’ If he could, Dad would have bought it and moved the family right then and there (or at least rent it for the summer)!”

All of us at the Henry Beston Society were saddened to hear that Marvin, who also staged a one-man performance of Henry Beston for the Beston Society on numerous occasions, died on Friday at the age of 93. His wife, Anne, had passed away only last summer.

I was first introduced to Marvin in 2003, when Bob Seay, then with WOMR-FM in Provincetown, contacted me about the possibility of co-sponsoring Marvin’s one-man act of a script by playwright Cynthia L. Cooper of New York at Eastham’s Chapel in the Pines. The performance was centered on Beston during the 1964 ceremony, with the author reflecting on the events of the previous 40 years. Thanks the efforts of Carol Green of Truro, this event, and another one at the Cape Cod National Seashore in 2004, came together.

Marvin and his wife, Anne, who passed away in 2013, were frequent visitors to the Cape, often staying at the Lighthouse Inn in West Dennis.

Marvin bore a strong resemblance to the late author of The Outermost House, who died in 1968. Although Marvin was not nearly as physically imposing as Beston was, his performance as the author at the Oct. 11, 1964 dedication ceremony of his famous Coast Guard Beach house as a National Literary Landmark was a towering feat.

Einhorn first became interested in Beston and The Outermost House back in the 1950s, when he read A Journal for Henry Beston, by Winfield Townley Scott. This prompted Marvin to contact Beston personally and ask his permission to re-enact his story, which the author happily granted. “I think Mr. Beston misunderstood me at first when I called,” Marvin recalled. “He thought we were going to make a movie and that I wanted him to star in it.”

It took Marvin several decades before he could finally act on his quest to play Beston. He finally hooked up with Cooper, who undertook a massive research project. Through this research, along with The Outermost House itself, Cooper was able to weave together an eloquent script for Einhorn, enabling him to fulfill his longtime dream of playing Beston.

The reading began with Beston at the 1964 dedication ceremony. “Slowly, Henry steps off the podium, reaches for sand and lets it run through his fingers, like a timer; he smells the sand, and rubs it all around his hands,” Cooper wrote in her script.

Marvin followed his sand activity by exclaiming, “The duneland burns with the smell of sand, ocean, and sun. Solitary and elemental, unsullied and remote, visited and possessed by the outer sea, these sands might be the end of the beginning of a world.”

The story soon drifts back to the 1920s, where Beston recalls his relationship to the woman who would become his wife, Elizabeth Coatsworth. He spoke of his gruesome experiences in World War I: “On the loneliest of nights beneath the blackened skies of France with exploding torpedoes and landscapes littered with ripped bodies, I dreamt about my prim New England village. No thoughts, only longing, only pictures of my long walks down the beach searching for a hermit crab.”

He continues, speaking about leaving his lofty position at The Atlantic Monthly in New York, and going “in search of something else.” Eventually, Beston ends up on the dunes of Eastham, as Marvin went into detail of his deal with local carpenter Harvey Moore to build his 20×16 house on the outer dunes. The fall season is what hooks him to stay. “Autumn is no lovelier in any region of the world than in New England,” he said.

Marvin continued with several classic Beston lines, passionately reading the “We need a wiser and more mystical concept of animals” quote, recalling the sinking of The Montclair, and a powerful description of the shape of the Outer Cape, giving the indications on his outer arm.

He concluded with the line: “For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach or from a little house on the outermost reaches of the outermost shore.”

Marvin is survived by his sons, Ken Einhorn and Stephen Einhorn, and a daughter, Ellen Zerkin.